After The Keepers sat with you,
I rubbed “the savor of good ointments” into the coolness of your skin.
I took your hand, light as a rabbit bone, and held it on my face.
No hindrances, that’s the custom, no delays–
Your clothes would have no pockets or knots to slow you down,
no toys to take with you, as if even you knew all along
that your coming had been your leaving
and the bolt in the door had not yet been thrown.
Two years ago, I was the first to bathe you–and now this.
I was “The honor-door” who carried you from your mother
on the eighth day after your birth
toward the verge of your covenant:
the almond seed without the givens that would never issue and bloom.
The half-life of the red buds they found behind your eyes,
whose petals, flowering and fading
began dropping before you were born.
On that verge, before your eyes and ears closed,
I taught you to read your father’s face as he spoke–
held your fingers on his throat and mouth
to feel the shifts in the muscles and skin,
the rustle time and timbered pulse of his vocal chords,
breath moving through teeth and lips,
around the liquid tongue.
I cupped your ear and whispered his words as he talked.
We read backwards from your touch,
your murmurs and eyes, to what moved them.
That night I imagined you as a man and put my fingers on your face.
You told me that I was “the woman from abroad”
and Grief was like Rumplestiltskin, who asks its own riddle:
“I’m not vulnerable to fire, water, earth or air, he said.
I lack nothing and can’t be destroyed, or displaced,
just changed in size or shape to shape.
I am more than an empty space as you can see
and similar to sorrow but different.
What’s the answer to Grief?”
.
He took me to his beachwood forests
where birds hung by their wings
and violins were strung up in the trees.
Under fixed constellations and a posthumous moon,
he showed me the hollow spaces that separate us
from other people and things—an emptiness
he said, that cannot be answered with words
I hummed a Tombeau, the themes from Mozart’s Requiem,
and Schubert’s last quintet.
He opened a vacant ache in my throat and said
that soon no one would remember my name,
that I would become a random stone
beyond the pale of settlement,
I picked up a pebble and put it under my tongue;
I sang him the stones at the bottom of that river
we have given so many names.
Yes, there are stones that do not move at the bottom of that river.
I let his ancient hunger absorb me–
All the lavenders, greens and the mustards of my true spring,
the full scarlets of summer, until he could hold no more.
My bodice of laughter loosened, and came undone.
The colors brimmed and overflowed
and I wrapped them around both of us
and they took us in.
And when I went to say goodby to your father,
I kissed his wet eyes, and held his tears in my mouth.
I put his hands on my face, as if I were talking to you,
and gave him back the kiss.